


Drink Lightly

by Brachylagus_fandom



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 12:43:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8249549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brachylagus_fandom/pseuds/Brachylagus_fandom
Summary: Iroh has always favored tea.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Allekha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/gifts).



Of all the hot drinks of the Fire Nation, Iroh has always favored tea. As a child, his firebending teacher taught him to brew it without a stove as a control exercise, and Iroh relishes any use of his talents that doesn't end with people dead.

When he goes to besiege Ba Sing Se, he takes a teapot and cups with him. They are plain porcelain, a gift from his teacher when he was first declared a master. Over the months of sitting outside the city walls without doing anything, he serves every officer and most of the infantry there from the set at least once. He is drinking from one of its cups when two drafted peasants who look so terribly sad bring him Lu Ten's body, and the drink has never tasted so bitter as it does then. After six hundred days of failure, Iroh buries his son and heads home.

Over the next few years, Iroh starts to wonder what this world would have been like if he had grown up to work in a tea house. The consequences of his actions are scattered before him, his failures whispered in soft drifts of steam, and he knows that there is only one atonement for his actions. Thanks to him, any hope for the future has been nearly destroyed, and it is time for him to help rebuild it.

He drinks with dragons. He teaches his nephew of places far away and times long gone. He stays with Zuko through a journey he is convinced he will die on, and all Iroh can say to that is that it has been far too long since he and Lu Ten shared a cup of tea. He may not see peace in his lifetime, but the world around him is pushing back against the violence of the past, and he thinks that that might be enough for him to die happy.


End file.
